


Night Shift

by mandalorianed



Series: Chiaroscuro [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bruce Wayne-centric, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Suicidal Ideation, basically bruce is just Going Through It, rated for the depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26674306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandalorianed/pseuds/mandalorianed
Summary: He spends so much of his time doing triage: Gotham’s crime rate, the lumbering behemoth of a company he’s been left in charge of, sometimes living and breathing people dripping blood onto the concrete. So what if it’s only sheer willpower getting him out of bed every day. He’s doing what he has to. He’s doing what’s expected of him.
Relationships: Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne
Series: Chiaroscuro [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/560117
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	Night Shift

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, yes, it's that time of the year again. The air is getting cooler, the leaves are changing color, and I'm showing up to post my one (1) fic since last fall. I swear I don't mean for it to be this way, it's just how it always seems to end up going. Anyway, the seasonal depression is piling up on top of the regular depression, so we're just projecting it all onto fictional characters. You know, as you do.
> 
> Chronologically, this one is set relatively early on in Bruce's tenure as Batman, pre-Dick by a few years. Characterization is _Chiaroscuro_ standard, but I just finished reading the Loeb runs ( _Long Halloween_ , _Dark Victory_ , and _Hush_ ), so some of those influences might've snuck in as well. Also pulled some inspiration from [this stellar playlist](https://8tracks.com/broosewayne/6-am).
> 
> And, as I say in the notes of all of these fics, reading the rest of [_Chiaroscuro_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/560117) isn't necessary to understand this story, but if you like it, you'll probably like the rest of the series too. Usually there's more Damian, but this time around it's just the adults having Emotions. Oh well.

**_11:00 PM_ **

It’s dark the way it always is in Gotham, which is to say not at all, not really. Too much light pollution from yellow-orange street lamps and the lights in a thousand different living rooms and the gleaming skyscrapers. There’s the smog to contend with, too, and the clouds that hover so often over the city, reflecting the light back down. So he crouches, jet black in the not-darkness, cape falling about him like a liquid rush of ink, and he looks out over the lit up skeleton of his city. And the wind rushes up to meet him, bringing with it the smell of trash and car exhaust and maybe, just maybe, a hint of rain off in the distance. He breathes in.

“Sir.” Alfred’s voice is dry in his ear. “Since you insist on remaining awake, there seems to be some sort of disturbance towards the harbor.”

His response is a toneless grunt as he pulls his grapple and launches himself into the cold night air, something that Alfred accepts in lieu of actual words with a quiet resignation. He should’ve said something, he thinks as he watches Seventh Avenue fly past beneath his feet and traces out where his next line needs to anchor. It would make Alfred worry less. And everything in his life is about “less” these days. He’s just trying to handle things: the Gotham crime rate, Wayne Enterprises, people’s expectations of him. Things need to be  _ better _ , but all he can ever seem to manage is  _ less bad _ . Eating the sandwiches Alfred brings down instead of subsisting solely on protein shakes and granola bars?  _ Less bad _ . Instituting regular schedules and full benefits for warehouse workers instead of the on-call, almost-but-never-quite-full-time rotations that the board had snuck in during his absence?  _ Less bad _ . Yanking a grappling line hard enough to strain his shoulder so he can cut off Seventh Ave and land in an alleyway currently full of two rather large men and one very small woman?  _ Less bad _ .

She’s cowering when he lands on the dumpster behind her in a clatter of metal. The men start backwards. She screams. One has a gun—stupid of him not to have noticed it; he’s slipping—and gets off a shot that buries itself in the dumpster. Shards of metal go flying; she screams again. And then a nose crumples under his fist with a satisfying crunch, and there’s a cry of pain as he drives his heel into the other one’s knee. A splash of water as that one goes down in a puddle. He sinks his knee into the man’s windpipe and gets a strangled gasp. Gets another solid punch into the other one’s chest. And then they’re scrambling backwards and away, but he tangles a grapple in a fire escape, goes up and over and lands in a crouch with a feral growl that even he doesn’t quite recognize. 

It’s over quickly after that. Two men ziptied and left at the mouth of the alley, and he walks back towards the woman. She isn’t as small as he’d thought, not now that she isn’t trying to take up as little space as possible. Dark skin and box braids and a face streaked with tears. Some of the shrapnel from the dumpster got her in the arm, and she has a hand clamped over it. He stops a few feet off from her, and she cranes her neck a little looking up at him.

“Can I?” He says, his voice a rougher growl than he means it to be. He forces himself to finish the sentence. “See it.”

She nods immediately, like she doesn’t even have to think about it, and she doesn’t flinch away when he kneels next to her. There’s some blood on his gloves, tacky as he moves his fingers, but the wounds on her arm aren’t so bad. She’ll need a few stitches, maybe. He tells her so, and she nods. There are sirens coming, now, ripping down Seventh Avenue, and one car skids to a stop just in front of the alleyway. The cop that steps out is one of Gordon’s, so he stands. She holds out a hand to him, asking him for help up like he isn’t a man dressed in black Kevlar who’d dropped from the sky like a bat out of hell. He pulls her onto her feet.

_ Less bad _ , he tells himself as he resumes his flight towards the harbor.  _ Less bad. Just focus on less bad _ .

* * *

**_1:00 AM_ **

He does feel something when someone triggers one of his motion sensors on the roof of the museum. It’s the first thing he’s felt all night besides numb exhaustion and the ferocious anger that he doesn’t like to inspect too closely because if he looks—if he  _ understands _ it—he suspects he won’t like what he’ll see. But it’s something, a jolt in his lungs and up through his heart like a shock. So he goes, landing quietly on the broad roof of the main exhibit hall, and finds the unique shape of Catwoman’s cowl silhouetted against one of the pyramidal glass skylights that spike upwards in regular intervals across the roof. The cool white glow of the fluorescent emergency lights below casts her face in greyscale, and he’s caught her in a moment of pure concentration. Her eyes are narrowed, the tip of her tongue sticks out between her teeth, and she’s sitting cross-legged, carefully prizing one of the large, triangular glass panes from its housing. She doesn’t so much as look up until he clears his throat behind her, and even then, she just slants a glance up at him, one brow arching upwards, as if to say that he should really have better manners than to interrupt her when she’s in the middle of something.

“Bat,” she says neutrally.

“Cat,” he replies in kind, a familiar step in the strange dance they’ve been practicing for the past year and a half. 

"Lovely night," she offers, as if he hasn't walked up on her committing a federal crime.

He tells her as much, and she grins. 

"Oh, say it again, Bat." She learns back against the skylight, a hand delicately falling across her forehead, a picture of overdramatic ravishment. " _ Felony _ . It makes my toes curl."

She's still smiling, no sultry edge to it, as if they really are just friends sharing a joke. And… And. It's dangerous. Deadly in a way most of what he does in uniform isn't.

It’s  _ dangerous _ because Catwoman isn’t a soft woman. She’s a woman who could probably fight him to a standstill, if she wanted to. If she put her mind to it. But instead she always stands a little too close and brushes teasing fingers across his cheek or presses gentle hands against his chest. She’s dangerous not just because she has to the training to be deadly and the criminal disregard to be uncontrollable. She’s dangerous because every time she laughs, it makes him want to grab her, hold her, press his face into her hair. Maybe she’d wrap her arms around him. Maybe she’d be warm.

“Bat.”

Her voice is irritated, and he’s clearly missed a few conversational beats. He blinks, tries to refocus.

“Cat,” he says, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.

She frowns at him.

“You really are no fun tonight,” she says, face twisted up in frustration, and it’s enough to spark some anger off in his gut. Not much, but he hasn’t had the space for much of anything recently.

“I’m not here to be fun,” he growls.

She cocks a hip, crosses her arms. “Well, then, what  _ are _ you here for?”

“To stop you from stealing a Monet.” She wouldn't.

“I was eying one of the Degas, actually.” She isn't.

“I don’t give a shit, Cat,” he snaps to swallow back the question of what plundered treasure she’s decided to return home this time. Then again, there’s an exhibit of Egyptian artefacts on loan from the British Museum opening on Monday, so maybe he already knows.

She recoils, affronted.

“Don’t get  _ angry _ with me. This is what I do, Bat. This is my  _ job _ .”

“And this is mine,” he growls, sidestepping around her.

He manages to grab her before she can flip away and zipties her hands tightly behind her. She hadn’t, he realizes suddenly, actually expected him to have a go at her. He wraps a gloved hand around her wrists, moving to push her forwards towards the fire escape leading down to street level, but she plants her feet and refuses to move. Twists around to look up at him. Her brows are drawn together.

“Bat,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

There’s genuine concern in her voice. Or, more likely, he just wants to think there is.

“It’s 1 AM, and I’m on the roof of the goddamned Museum of Art,” he says, and he wrangles her down the stairs.

* * *

**_2:00 AM_ **

There's a little boy sitting outside on a fire escape. He can't be more than ten or so, pale skin and shaggy, dark hair that's gone a little too long without a cut, and he's wearing an oversized Gotham Knights sweatshirt, one that's big enough that he's pulled it down over his drawn up knees. The lights are on in the apartment behind him, but Bruce has been crouched across the way, listening to a police scanner and resolutely not thinking about Catwoman, for the last half hour, and there hasn't been even the slightest flicker of movement in the building behind him. The kid curls in on himself a bit more before wiping at his eyes with his sweatshirt sleeve, and honestly, it's just instinct. Bruce finds himself standing to his full height and unfurling a grappling line towards the other side of the street before he really thinks it through. 

He lands on the next fire escape over, giving the kid a chance to recognize him and retreat inside before he grapples to the level above him. Although the kid startles at the sound of Bruce's feet hitting the grating, he doesn't crawl back through the window, just watches Bruce cautiously as he comes halfway down the stairway, stopping when his feet are about level with the boy's head. They stare at each other for a long moment and, ah, yes. Bruce hadn't really considered his next step, had he.

“Are—” He cuts himself off, his voice too gruff even to his own ears, even without the little alarmed startle from the little boy. He tries again, tries to speak the way he's heard Kent or Diana speak to children. “Are you hurt?”

A pause, then the kid shakes his head.

“That's good,” he offers stupidly and then resists the urge to groan. Forget being bad with kids, there’s no way that would cut it with an adult either.  _ That's good.  _ Fuck off.

“Are your parents here,” he asks after a silence that he definitely lets stretch far too long. It's also maybe not the right thing to say, as the kid curls in on himself miserably.

“Mom is,” he says, casting a miserable glance into the apartment behind him. “Dad had to go for work, and she's always worse when he isn't here.” Bruce stiffens, wondering if asking the boy to self-evaluate his own injuries had been a mistake, but the kid isn't done talking. It's like the question had hit some kind of switch, and the words just come pouring out of him. “I think she tries, but she just sleeps all day, and she barely talks to me. And it's better, I guess? It just feels better if I sit out here and pretend she can't hear me. And Dad was supposed to be back tonight, but his train's super late, and I—”

His voice chokes off, and he buries his face in his drawn up knees. And… well. There are lots of problems in Gotham City that Bruce can't punch better. He knows this, it isn't news. There are some that he can't even fix by throwing money at them. 

“There's a mental health clinic on Rockwell, near Maplewood,” he finally says after reviewing his own internal map of the city. “They have a—” He cuts himself off. The ten-year-old doesn't care if the Rosenbaum Clinic has a Wayne Industries grant or how health insurance works. “They don't turn people away for not being able to pay, if that's a concern,” he says instead. It's still a little far, but there's no place he knows in this neighborhood that offers a sliding scale, and… Whatever, he's not sure why he feels like he has to justify himself.

The boy looks up at him curiously. “‘Kay.”

“Tell your father.”

“I will.” A pause where the boy keeps studying him. Then, “You know, Brett said you have, like, fangs and stuff, but you're actually really nice.”

He blinks in surprise, a gesture that doesn't make it past his cowl.

“I'm not,” he says, mostly without his own permission, and winces. The kid, on the other hand, just looks unconvinced.

“Sure,” he says. “Anyway, I—”

The door in the apartment behind them swings open, revealing a very tired looking man in a rumpled suit. The boy doesn't even say anything, just jumps backs through the window and runs for him, and his father catches him in a hug without hesitation. Bruce turns his head then, pulling paper and a pencil stub from a pouch on his belt, glad for an excuse to look away. He scribbles “Rosenbaum Clinic, Rockwell and Maplewood, sliding scale” in his most nondescript block print and leaves the paper on the sill. The night is quiet around him as he leaps lightly from the railing, doing his best to think solely about not falling three stories down to the pavement rather than what it felt like to have parents who still could come home late if you waited up for them.

* * *

**_5:00 AM_ **

It’s so early that his bones ache. The first pale hints of dawn are creeping up over the horizon, turning the dark sky a blurry grey, and the air has the cold shiver of morning to it. He’s sitting on the edge of one of Wayne Tower’s upper terraces, just below the luminous blue clock faces that adorn its highest peak, with his forehead resting against a guardrail and his heels idly bumping one of the steel supports between the windows. The city below him is still lit up for the night, a glowing web of lights that skitters towards the horizon, but soon enough those will begin to blink out, giving way to sunrise.

She’s a whisper of movement in the corner of his eye when she comes, silently padding across the rooftop until she’s standing beside him. She spreads her hands on the highest portion of the guardrail, leans forward. He wonders how long it had taken her to wriggle her way out of the handcuffs and away from the police. Once, she had told him that her record was twenty-six seconds, but she lies to him a lot. Sometimes for business. Sometimes for fun. The only sound between them in the early morning silence is their own breathing and the cooing of waking doves. She sits down, a handbreadth away.

Slowly, methodically, she removes her gloves. They’re custom made, yet another tool in her kit, and they fit her like a second skin. She carefully tugs on each fingertip before finally easing them away and laying them gently on her lap. Her hands are unremarkable—very well-manicured, if short, nails and a scar or two on her knuckles—excepting in that he’s never seen them before. Batman and Catwoman, both with their own uniforms, carefully equipped for the goals they pursue during Gotham’s long, long nights, and for all she’s flirted with him, their masks have always stayed firmly in place. And then, as if to purposefully prove him wrong, she reaches up and pulls her goggles up to rest on her forehead.

The cowl still covers a large portion of her face, obscuring her features, but without the impediment of the red lenses, he can see that she has shockingly green eyes. He can also see that she looks tired, shadows shaded darkly under those brilliant eyes. It’s not worth pretending that he hasn’t been staring, but she doesn’t call him on it, just crosses her arms on a guardrail at shoulder height for her and leans her cheek against them, looking back at him. He turns forward again, his forehead still pressed against the rail.

“Twelfth dynasty artefacts?” His voice is quiet, partially because it feels strange to break the silence and partially because he doesn’t have it in him to be loud.

He can see something in her posture tighten out of the corner of his eye, but all she says is, “Will that be a problem?”

The Egyptia government has been trying to get some of those pieces back for ten years. He shakes his head, and she relaxes again.

“Did you need something?” he asks when she doesn’t say anything else.

She looks at him for a long moment, and he can practically see her debating what exactly she’s going to say. And then she sighs and props her chin on her arms instead, looking out over Gotham again.

“Just wondering why you’re sitting here with your feet dangling over a hundred and fifteen stories of empty air,” she says. “It’s the sort of thing that might worry a girl, if she were the sort of person to worry about other people.”

He blinks at her, surprised out of words for a moment.

“I’m not—” He stumbles over himself for a moment before redirecting. “I jump off buildings all the time. So do you.”

“You know that’s not my point.”

He stops, stymied slightly. Because that’s… it’s… Well, it’s not an option, and he has too much to do. Because Bruce Wayne is useful to reign in the Wayne Enterprises board, and because Batman is useful to give Gotham’s seething criminal underworld a target, to give them something else to hit besides the city’s people. Because someone would have to find him. Because Alfred has already lost enough, bears enough weight on his shoulders, without Bruce adding to it any more than he already has. He doesn’t know how to explain any of that to the woman beside him.

“I’m not going to kill myself,” he says, finally, because she’s looking at him again, and because it is strangely difficult not to talk to her when she’s sitting here, all her attention focused on him.

She’s resting her cheek on her arms again, studying him.

“Okay,” she says, simply.

A pause.

“Okay,” he replies.

But she doesn’t look away, eyes still roaming across his face. There isn’t judgement in her expression, or even worry, strictly speaking. She’s just… looking. In the moment, he isn’t sure what she’s seeing, or what face he should be trying to show her.

“You’re not, though,” she finally says. 

He’d clearly lost the thread of this conversation somewhere. “What?”

“You’re not okay. And—” She stops, frowns. “Look, I know you’re ‘the Bat of Gotham’ and all, but we’re not… we’re not always on opposite sides, you know.”

Twenty-two heists in the past year and a half, most of which ended with a stolen treasure returned to its rightful home. Never a single serious injury, even when people got in her way. Her refusal to carry anything more threatening than a whip and a baton. The way she deployed that whip and baton on anyone who threatened any of the working girls in the Bowery. The hundred small kindness he’s seen her do for anyone she considers less fortunate than her, a group that has occasionally included him himself.

“I know,” he says.

She adds, slightly flustered, “And you don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’m not… I mean, I don’t want you to think that I’m fishing for information or whatever. It’s just that…” She pauses, hands twisting together in her lap before she seems to force them to relax against her thighs. “Look, I just know what it’s like to have to keep a whitekunckled grip on your life because if one thing breaks, the whole thing’s gonna come down.”

He can see the truth of it in the tightness of her jaw and lines of tension around her eyes. Perhaps she’s exactly the kind of person who would understand if he explained that in between the nightmares and the desperate attempts to keep up appearances and the horrible way that the world only seemed to make sense if he was halfway through a fistfight… In between all of that, he felt like everything he did was an apology for a sin he hadn’t committed and couldn’t quite name.

Lip caught between her teeth, she looks almost embarrassed now as she adds, “I know what I say doesn’t matter, and I’m just the thief with the whip who makes you chase her around in the middle of the night, but—”

She cuts herself off, face twisted in some struggle that’s still hidden too deep below the surface for him to interpret, and then she unfolds one of her arms and, tentatively, holds out a hand towards him, palm up. He finds himself staring at it, somehow dumbfounded by the simple gesture. It almost costs him the moment as she starts to draw back, wincing slightly, maybe at him, maybe at herself, but he doesn’t take the time to find out. In a single, quick motion, he pulls off his own glove and grabs her hand, suddenly desperate. She’s so much smaller than him, and his hand dwarfs hers. Larger and coarser, and his skin is much lighter than hers, but she weaves their fingers together immediately and squeezes his hand. The wind has chilled her skin, but her grip is firm.

He isn’t sure what to say to her, and based on the slightly embarrassed look on her face, she hadn’t quite expected to get this far either. So they sit there, and Bruce thinks about calculated risks and faith and the peculiar knowledge that somehow he at least trusts Catwoman this far. The sun finally breaks the horizon, slowly bathing the rooftop in pale yellow light, and she suddenly snorts in laughter beside him.

“I thought you’d, like, burst into flames in the sunlight,” she says when he directs a questioning look down at her.

“I’m not a vampire.” His voice is flat.

There’s a smile twitching at the corners of her lips. “You do such a convincing impression, though.”

He considers the previous October and a profoundly shortsighted agreement to lend Zatana a helping hand when she was last in Gotham.

“I do not,” he says with great finality.

She squints at him. “...No way.”

“Hn.” 

"Ok," she says, visibly forcing herself to disregard fiends of the night for the moment. "But there's also a non-zero number of people in the city who think you're a bat person. Like, an actual bat person."

He's aware. He encourages it occasionally to offset the slow degradation of his status as an urban legend. It wasn’t something he’d considered back at the beginning, when he wasn’t much more than Gotham’s own personal cryptid, but unfortunately helping people tends to humanize you to them. He should probably be more deliberate about it, actually. His goal was (and always had been) to create a symbol to terrify the criminal elements of the city. He should just be a terror in the night; it’s more efficient. The problem, he realizes, is that he perhaps doesn’t want the citizens of Gotham to be afraid of their bat.

“You know better than that,” he says instead.

She looks suddenly, obscurely delighted. “Are you saying that I  _ know you _ well enough to know better?”

He hadn't been aware that he was stepping into a trap, but the look on her face is doing strange things to his heart, and he needs her to stop.

“I'm saying that you have eyes, Cat.” And then, to cut this off before things get any more dangerous, “It’s late.”

He moves to stand up, leaning towards her as he shifts his weight to get a foot back up on solid ground, and she freezes him in place as she suddenly puts her free hand on his shoulder. For a moment, he’s sure that she’s going to kiss him, and he’s transfixed by the possibility running like fire down his nerves, practically punching the breath out of him. It’s terrifying, the breadth of this desire. And then she leans forward, gently removing her other hand from his before she wraps her arms around his waist, resting her cheek against his chest. Instinctually, he freezes and then, very carefully, wraps an arm around her. It makes his chest feel like it’s going to collapse, her being so close. She murmurs something so quiet that he doesn’t catch anything besides “careful.” And then she stands, quick and businesslike, and pulls her gloves back on and her goggles back into place before pausing again.

“Goodnight, Bat,” she finally says.

“Cat,” he replies, still sitting on the ground and feeling oddly concussed. She plants a hand on the railing, grapple in hand, and he adds before she leaps, “Thank you.”

Shock raises her eyebrows for a second, before she recovers enough to give him a saucy wink offset by a crooked, genuine smile.

“What’re friends for?” And then she’s over the railing and gone, swinging back north towards The Bowery, leaving him to try to sort out the writhing tangle of emotions she just let loose in his chest.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [@bobafett](https://bobafett.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, so catch me there for, to be brutally honest, mostly just a lot of gifsets of _The Untamed_ right now. But usually there's also Batman and Star Wars. I also recently remade the blog, so if you haven't refollowed, this your heads up to do that.
> 
> Also, since people might be curious about it, I am still working on the sequel to ["Brothers in Arms,"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10830678) aka "Jon and Damian actually have to deal with the implications of Damian's murderous history: the fic." I've got about 40k of it spread out across three documents and at least five drafts, but I think I'm getting close to a breakthrough on it. Maybe we'll get that done before next fall! Who knows! 
> 
> Anyway, until next time. Stay safe out there, y'all.


End file.
